Sustainability stuff: PART I

Hey all! Hope your week end has been as good as or better than mine!! Party Friday night, lunch with some friends Saturday, followed by a nearly 3h long salsa and tango class, today study and attended a Violin orchestra concert which was mind blowing! – More details on the social side later.

I wanted to share some of the great content we are learning here in the scope of our Masters of Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability. I may have talked to you personally about sustainability before, and I imagine that we would have gone in many directions, be it social, ecological, economical etc... Defining sustainability itself can be difficult. The course has put things in perspective quite well for us, I’ll try to convey the message as best as I can and hopefully you will get a good feel for it after ‘Part II’.

One of the most important things we know is that we, human beings, are biological beings; made of flesh and bones, and are part of an ecological system. This system is called the biosphere, a thin ‘living crust’ on the surface of the planet. It now boasts with an incredible diversity of living species that each provide a certain service. Like bees carrying pollen for some plants to reproduce, everything has a role. 

Humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but for us to be able to exist, the planet has gone through incredible events. For instance the presence of the moon stabilized the planet’s rotation on its axis, due to its mass and therefore its gravity effect. I didn’t know that before and was amazed! I thought all planets turned on a very stable polar axis, but they don’t. Mars turns in random directions, unpredictably! The stability of our planet alone allows complex life to be the way it is today. Complex life came from single cell organisms – ‘microbes’ – in the oceans. For over a billion years they produced oxygen by photosynthesis. The early atmosphere was not breathable, there was no ozone layer shielding life (outside the oceans) from the deadly solar radiation (UVs), and it was full of carbon. When enough oxygen had been produced, the ozone layer formed (ozone is a molecule made of 3 oxygen atoms). Later there was enough actual oxygen in the atmosphere that new forms of life could use. What’s so special about oxygen anyway?? I won’t go into the details but it allows cells to get A LOT more energy out of the food they take. Very quickly, thanks to the oxygen rich atmosphere, complex life developed. 

Source: Brendan Moore, BTH

This timeline shows how much time it has taken to get to complex life, including plants, animals, insects etc... On top, you can barely see anything for the Homo sapiens part, that’s because we’ve been around for ‘no time’ compared to what’s happened before us on Earth. The Chicxulub thing is the point where the dinosaurs disappeared.

There have been several mass extinctions even before the dinosaurs were wiped out, I won’t go any deeper in this, but most of them were related to climate, because climate is a set of physical conditions that allows life to exist on the surface of the planet. For as long as humanity has existed, surface conditions have been relatively stable. That was insured by the balance created by life – plants removed enough CO2 (a greenhouse gas that retains heat from the sun in the atmosphere) to bring the conditions allowing us to live, and other natural mechanisms (eg. Erosion, decomposition) maintained greenhouse gases in the good proportions to keep some heat too. So we live in an incredibly complex, balanced world.

By the way humans have evolved through some very cold times, the last ice age for instance ended just about 18,000 years ago! Ice ages happen periodically, according to the Milankovitch cycles which are variations of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. The orbit is elliptical but changes shape over time, which changes the Earths exposure to solar radiation (I will post more specific details another time). Anyhow, during cold periods the ocean can dissolve more CO2 than hot periods, and other mechanisms have insured climate ‘stability’ as mentioned before. Yes, most of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere is dissolved in the oceans. The graph below shows the variations of CO2 concentrations (in red) in the atmosphere over the last 600,000 years. Concentration means how much of it is actually there compared to other components. It is expressed in parts per million (ppm), which mean that for a million other things, there is X number of CO2 molecules.

In the graph the 'low CO2' periods represent ice ages, and the 'high periods' are warm ones, like the one we are in now. As you can see the cycles are quite steady through time. 

Source: IPCC 2007, 446

However, we are today out of the bounds of the natural cycle, due to the systematic release of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Before then, the CO2 concentration was stable at about 280ppm; it is now 385ppm and keeps increasing. More CO2 means more retention of heat, which changes the climate, causes the oceans to expand (therefore sea levels to rise), affects natural habitats, biodiversity etc... To me a big realisation is that the CO2 increase and global warming represent the imbalance we have caused within the biosphere and atmosphere. It is the result of continuous, systematic extraction of resources, production, consumption and waste.

Source: NOAA Satellite and Information Service and IPCC

It is difficult to think that we had that much adverse effects on the planet, but there are now 6.7 billion people on Earth (only 2.5 billion 60 years ago!!), and the entire society strives for growth. More and more people are gaining access to modern life (in itself it’s not a problem), however we are still heavily relying on fossil fuels to respond to a growing demand for energy. Here is a good example of how the pursuit of growth becomes disproportionate and ridiculous over time:

Between 1880 and 1980 the world crude oil consumption grew at 7% per year. If growth had continued at 7%/year, it would have looked like this:

Source: Dr. Goran Broman, BTH

But after all, people just want to meet their needs. I will elaborate on social problems and get to define sustainability as clearly as possible in the next post, showing more of why we actually need to be worried too.